Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film Kinds of Kindness will hit cinemas this summer. Here’s everything we know about the Cannes-premiering movie.
Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’s follow-up to the wildly successful Poor Things is just around the corner. Originally titled And, Kinds of Kindness marks Lanthimos’s ninth feature film as director, and stars a number of familiar faces from his previous work and beyond. But what’s it about, and when can we expect to see it? Here’s everything we know about the movie!
Everything we know about the plot of Kinds of Kindness
Described as a ‘triptych fable’ by Searchlight Pictures, this anthology film follows three stories set in the contemporary USA. The distributor describes the first tale as ‘a man without choice who tries to take control of his own life’, while the second synopsis is kept similarly vague, involving a policeman whose wife returns with a different personality after going missing . The final story involves a woman in search of a person with a special ability, who is ‘destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader’.
Lanthimos himself has also commented on the premise of Kinds of Kindness, describing the experience of making the film to The Guardian as ‘like shooting three films, really’. No wonder then that it clocks in at two hours and 44 minutes, the longest movie in Lanthimos’s filmography to date.
Will any of the Poor Things cast be in the film?
Poor Things fans will recognise several familiar faces, most notable its star Emma Stone, who won her second Academy Award for Best Actress earlier this year for her role in the film. The US actress appears for the fourth time in a Lanthimos picture, having also starred in The Favourite and the 2022 short film Bleat.
Alongside Stone are Poor Things’ Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley, as well as previous Lanthimos collaborator Joe Alwyn (The Favourite).
Who else is in Kinds of Kindness?
The list of big names set to appear in the film doesn’t stop at Lanthimos’s darlings. We’ll also see Jesse Plemons, fresh from Alex Garland’s Civil War, Euphoria and The Hunger Games star Hunter Schafer, Hong Chau (The Whale) and Mamoudou Athie (Elemental).
And despite Kinds of Kindness being a three-part anthology film, you don’t need to worry about your faves having their screen time cut down. Lanthimos has stated in an interview with the Guardian that each of the film’s stories features the same four or five main actors appearing in different roles!
Who else is working on Kinds of Kindness?
Frequent Lanthimos collaborator Robbie Ryan returns as cinematographer, as does co-writer Efthimis Filippou, for the first time since 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Yorgos Mavropsaridis, who has edited all of Lanthimos’s films to date. The film is produced by Lanthimos, alongside Ed Guiney, Kasia Malipan and Andrew Lowe, all of whom co-produced Poor Things.
Any Lanthimos fan knows that his recent films have been marked by delightfully extravagant costumes and sets. For Kinds of Kindness, costume designer Jennifer Johnson, who recently worked on the Marilyn Monroe film Blonde, and production designer Anthony Gasparro (First Cow), both collaborated with Lanthimos for the first time. The film’s soundtrack is by Poor Things composer Jerskin Fendrix.
Why we should be looking forward to a new Yorgos Lanthimos film
A new Lanthimos film is always a reason to be cheerful, especially when it arrives just a year after his last. The Athens-born director has rapidly become a Hollywood staple in recent years, yet he has lost little of the eccentric style and idiosyncratic worldview that has characterised his films since his early work in Greece.
Having started out with well-received independent films such as Dogtooth and Alps, Lanthimos’s first English-language film was 2015’s The Lobster, an absurdist black comedy starring Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz and Olivia Colman, all of whom would return to work with him in one of his following two films, The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Farrell) and The Favourite (Colman and Weisz).
After the latter film earned Lanthimos his first Oscar nomination for Best Director and a Best Actress win for Colman, the director was handed a hefty reported budget of $35 million for his next film, last year’s Poor Things. Based loosely on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, this unconventional coming-of-age tale follows Bella Baxter, a Frankenstein-like being whose infant brain is transplanted into the body of an adult woman. Bella’s journey of self-discovery was warmly received by critics, winning the Golden Lion at the 80th Venice International Film Festival and receiving 11 Oscar nominations, with four wins.
With a back catalogue like Lanthimos’s, we can expect from Kinds of Kindness another critical hit that’s unafraid to sail into the weird and wonderful.
When will Kinds of Kindness be released?
Kinds of Kindness will have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024, followed by cinema releases on June 21 (USA) and June 28 (UK and Ireland).
Will Kinds of Kindness be available on streaming?
While no plans for streaming have been announced yet, as a Searchlight release, Kinds of Kindness is likely to eventually hit Disney+ and Hulu some time after its theatrical run.
